Jascha Nemtsov’s From St. Petersburg to Vienna is the English translation of the author’s doctoral thesis, Die Neue Jüdische Schule in der Musik, completed two decades ago. A Siberian-born pianist and professor of the history of Jewish music in Weimar, Nemtsov is a champion of the repertory of Jewish music he discovered in the 1990s. Like his protagonists in Russia who undertook ethnographic expeditions to the Pale of Settlement to save disappearing cultural treasures, Nemtsov has made his mission the promotion of the musical fruits of a Jewish cultural renaissance that began in the first decade of the twentieth century in Russia. This story has now been told several times by Nemtsov and others. Yet having Nemstov’s decades-long research accessible in English and in one volume is valuable, even if at times the book reads more like an encyclopedic gathering of information than a coherent narrative.

Like the assimilated Jews in Russia who adopted secular nationalism from Russian society, the first musicians who embraced the idea of Jewish music drew on a well-rehearsed Russian model of creating national music from the combination of folk music and European forms. The first attempts were little more than earnest settings of Jewish folk songs, which Nemtsov dismisses as neither aesthetically nor ethnographically valuable. He has greater appreciation for composers who tried to create an aesthetically higher quality art music that could still be understood as nationally specific. To underline this agenda, Nemtsov spends a long time debunking the myth of Joel Engel’s role in the foundation of the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg. In his telling Engel emerges as a mediocre composer who achieved his goals through expert self-promotion and business savvy. But the conflict between Engel’s and Lazar Saminsky’s objectives were not only ideological and aesthetic. It also reflected Saminsky’s and his colleagues’ investment in modernism, which was beyond Engel’s more traditional musical horizon. What Saminsky advocated for Jewish music was neo-nationalism (a term Nemtsov never uses), an artistic practice of combining supposedly “authentic” national musical elements with modernist techniques, in which the authenticity of the source lent authenticity to modernist art. For modernists the model was no longer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, but Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók. As Joachim Stutschewsky wrote, Alexander Krein’s Piano Sonata “is about as Jewish as Bartók’s is Hungarian” (205).

Nemtsov ends the book with Joseph Achron’s wish for Jewish art music to “escape from our musical Ghetto” (269). The time period in which Jewish music indeed functioned outside the ghetto was 1923–31, during a second run for the Moscow Society for Jewish Music. The emphasis shifted from folk music to art music, written by skilled, talented composers. Their Jewish music attracted a wide, not exclusively Jewish audience, first-rate performers, and even critics, among them Leonid Sabaneyev, whose pamphlet about the “Jewish National School of Music” promoted the new Jewish school of composers both in Russia and abroad. As Nemtsov writes, only the Moscow Society “was completely and without restriction integrated into general musical life” (153). But there was a catch, which was the Society’s weakening ties with political Zionism. During the improved economic conditions of the New Economic Policy (NEP) period many Jews, among them Mikhail Gnessin, lost interest in emigration to Palestine and under ideological pressure renounced Zionism and religious traditions. The music these composers produced was high quality and had a Jewish character, but it was less engaged with the original nationalist goals of the Jewish cultural renaissance. What is missing from Nemtsov’s account is the role the Yevsektsia, the anti-Zionist Jewish wing of the Communist Party, played in the repression of Jewish nationalist political aspirations in the Soviet Union.

The best chapter, published previously in Musica Judaica, is Nemtsov’s meticulous analysis of the Jewish publishing houses Jibneh and Juwal in Berlin. Nemtsov shows the confluence of Zionist enthusiasm, individual financial investment, personal rivalries, ideological differences, and financial interests interacting during the parallel existence of these two Jewish institutions in the German capital. The dichotomy between Yiddish (the language of the diaspora) and Hebrew (the language of the Bible and a future Jewish state) was again on display, Engel promoting, at Yuwal, what Achron considered “tastelessness and dilettantism” (132), but what had much more financial potential than Jibneh composers’ serious efforts to create music according to “the highest artistic demands” (130).

Nemtsov adds two exhaustive appendices, one providing biographical information about the composers discussed in the book; the other a complete list of publications of Jewish music in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Paris, and New York.